Venture Inside the Command Center of the World’s Largest Airline

The world’s busiest airport isn’t in the world’s biggest city. It’s in Atlanta, a great southern city that by dint of accident and capitalism sits, metaphorically speaking, at the center of the map.

More than 2,500 flights carrying 250,000 passengers pass through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International each day, headed to or coming from 225 cities around the world. Delta, which carries more passengers than any other airline, accounts for 75 percent of that traffic.

In the first episode of WIRED’s Flight Mode, we take you into Delta’s “mission control,” where nearly 300 people track every one of the hundreds of aircraft in the airline’s fleet. Each follows flights through a different part of the world, using the world’s scariest spreadsheet to monitor everything from the weather to maintenance issues to air traffic control, to keep everyone moving along smoothly.

It’s thankless work, because if everything goes well, no one knows these people even exist. So the next time you take off without delay, mutter a word of thanks to these folks and their inscrutable spreadsheets.

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The Fancy Tech Pilots Use to Keep Your Flight Turbulence-Free

Turbulence does more than jostle your drink and make you feel ill. It costs airlines $100 million a year in flight delays, damage to airplanes, and injuries to passengers.

Pilots do their best to avoid it by adjusting their altitude or changing course. Doing that requires knowing turbulence is coming, and clear-air turbulence is almost impossible to spot.

In the past, pilots received a weather briefing at the start of their day, and that was it. If they had several domestic flights, or one long international one, that information could be hours out of date. As tablets (or electronic flight bags) have replaced paper charts and documents, pilots can use apps to get real-time updates on weather conditions, including reports from planes ahead of them.

It’s like Waze for the sky. It’s the latest addition to cockpits which are becoming increasingly connected.

What It’s Like to Narrowly Avert Disaster in an $18M Airliner Sim

Nobody who steps onto an airplane wants to think about mechanical failures, extreme weather, or the countless other things that can go wrong. But that’s all pilots think about. They prepare for any situation, and run through emergency scenarios so often that handling them becomes second nature.

This requires untold hours in a simulator, because you can’t actually, say, start an engine fire for training purposes. But a few taps on a touchscreen can recreate the experience with startling realism, allowing a flight crew to run through the process of shutting down the engine, cutting off its fuel, and dousing it with flame retardant before trimming out for level flight and deciding where to land.

Simulators, which can cost as much as $18 million, use high-def screens and authentic cockpit components to maximize realism. If you think you’ve got what it takes to land a 767 with a damaged landing gear in zero visibility during a snowstorm, many airlines offer anyone with the money (or the points) the chanceto give it a try. It may not leave you prepared for such an emergency next time you take a seat in 16C, but perhaps you’ll rest a little easier knowing the flight crew is.

Your Luggage’s Grand Robotic Adventure From Check-In to the Clouds

You drop your bag on the scale, watch the check-in agent slide that ribbon of sticker through the handle and press a button to send it jerkily down a conveyor and through a rubber curtain.

That’s the last time most of us think about our baggage at the airport. After that it’s all about which line is quickest for security, and whether the TSA guy is going to call you out over the toiletries you didn’t put in a plastic bag.

But that bag you paid yet more cash to check has its own path to follow. To reach your plane at the same time you do, it flies through the bowels of the airport on a roller coaster ride that would make Six Flags jealous. It covers miles of underground tunnels, rolls through scanning machines, and encounters friendly robots.

Like with all migrations, not everyone makes it. Out of the 3.2 billion bags the global flying public hands over each year, airlines lose, misplace, or steal more than 20 million. You’ll feel better when you hear the number of mishandled bags fell to an all-time low in 2015, despite increasing passenger numbers.

For that, you can thank swanky new tech like RFID tags, better tracking, and tricked out robots, all which are better than ever at making sure you don’t have to spend your beach vacation in a borrowed swimsuit. Here’s a look behind the scenes at this evolving, unseen journey.

A Rare Look Inside the Vault Where Rebuilt Jet Engines Prove They Can Fly

Watching a modern, massive, airliner taxi down a runway, slowly pick up speed, and then haul itself into the sky is one of the most impressive demonstrations of man-made engineering and ingenuity. Thanks go to the jet engine.

A pair of the things, slung underwing on a plane like a Boeing 777, provide enough thrust to push the aircraft and its hundreds of passengers aloft, spinning reliably for over 5,000 miles, day after day.

In the second episode of WIRED’s Flight Mode, we take you inside Delta’s tech ops facility at Hartsfield-Jackson airport, where the airline’s engineers tear down engines, put them back together, then run a battery of tests on them. In a facility the size of 47 football fields, these folks check everything from the huge fan blades at the front to the tiny components of the fuel injectors. Fun fact: That white swirly on the center of an engine isn’t for decoration, or to scare birds. It’s a safety feature for ground techs: If the engine’s spinning quickly enough that you can’t clearly see it, you know you’re in danger of being converted to apple sauce.

Those men and women have to service engines for more than a dozen kinds of planes, made by Airbus, Boeing, and McDonnell Douglas. But they apply the same rigor to each powerplant they reassemble before bolting it back onto a plane. That means hauling it down to a concrete bunker, hanging it from a test rig, and spinning it up to full speed while technicians measure its vital statistics and check for leaks.

While the staff in charge of Delta’s testing hope nothing catastrophic happens, the engine’s designers deliberately aim for the worst case scenario. To certify an engine, they fire everything from sand, to ice, to already-dead chickens into their machines to make sure they can handle failure in a controlled manner.

This sort of maintenance and testing is the reason a jet engine is likely to go 30 years between failures, compared to 365 days back in the 60s. Which is a very good thing when you realize that they propel 100,000 planes to perform the impossible every single day.